They sent everyone home early.
Structural damage, said the principal over the intercom, in the specific voice adults use when they mean we have absolutely no idea what just happened.
Gas leak, said someone else.
Seismic activity, said the news van that showed up twenty minutes later. The reporter kept saying unprecedented, like it was a prize she'd won.
I walked out the front entrance at 1:15 PM with my backpack over one shoulder and the very specific feeling of being watched.
Not by the cameras.
By something that didn't have eyes. Or had too many. One of those.
I did not look around.
Here's a thing I know that most people don't: looking around tells whatever's watching you that you know it's there. Then it stops waiting and starts doing something about it.
Basic predator logic.
I learned this approximately four thousand years before backpacks existed.
I kept walking. Casual. Normal teenager going home early, very chill, no divine heritage whatsoever.
Cut left toward the side gate. Quieter. Smarter.
Worst decision I made all day. And I'd already had a ceiling fall on me.
Thirty feet past the gate, the air changed.
That's the only way to describe it. Didn't get colder. Didn't get darker. The air just thickened. Like the whole atmosphere held its breath.
I stopped.
"Okay," I said to nobody. "Come on then."
It came from above.
Of course, it came from above. I should have looked up. I always say look up, and I never look up.
It hit the ground ten feet ahead of me, and the asphalt cracked like a spider web all the way to the curb.
I looked at it.
It looked at me.
With too many eyes.
So once upon a time this was a Drakon — one of the great serpent-dragons of the ancient world, sacred to gods I won't name because honestly they don't deserve the attention. Enormous. Terrifying. The whole thing.
That's what it used to be.
What it was now was worse.
Centuries floating around in the void between worlds had done something to it. The scales were darker. Almost liquid. Like oil on water but angrier. The eyes — too many, arranged in a way that physically hurt to look at directly — were wrong in a new and creative way.
And it was big. Way bigger than it should have been.
It had been eating things in the dark for a very long time.
It opened its mouth and the sound that came out was almost a word.
Almost my name.
I genuinely hate that.
"Alright," I said, dropping my backpack. "Let's do this."
Here is the thing about being Zeus in a teenage body.
The power is there. I can feel it. Like when a word is right on the tip of your tongue and you know you know it — that's what my divine power feels like in this body. Present. Real. Incredibly, frustratingly almost there.
Getting it out is the problem.
It's like trying to start a car with a dead battery. Sometimes it turns over on the first try. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes a Drakon is charging at you across a school parking lot and you're just standing there going come ON—
The Drakon charged.
I dove sideways — hit the ground way harder than expected because this body has the durability of a regular human teenager which is to say essentially none — rolled, came up with gravel in my hand and a scraped elbow.
Ow.
The Drakon turned. Faster than it should for something that size.
Battery, I thought hard at myself. Battery, come ON—
It lunged again.
And then—
The lightning came out sideways.
Not forward. Sideways, and slightly downward, which was genuinely embarrassing, but it hit the Drakon in the left flank and the thing screamed that almost-word and lurched back.
Small win.
My entire arm went numb to the shoulder.
That definitely didn't used to happen.
The Drakon circled. It was smart enough to be careful now, which meant it was smart enough to be more dangerous, which was really not what I needed right now.
I shook feeling back into my fingers.
Okay. Second shot. Bigger this time. More controlled. I just needed to—
"Left side."
I spun around.
Demi. Standing at the gate. School blazer still dusty from the cafeteria. Wearing an expression I recognized — the exact face she makes when she's about to correct something I got wrong.
"The left flank," she said. "The scales are damaged where you already hit it. Hit it there again. Harder this time."
The Drakon was circling left.
Presenting exactly that spot.
"Why are you here," I said.
"I saw this happening." She said it the way you'd say I saw it on the news. Completely matter-of-fact. "I was at the bus stop and then I just — I saw it. Thirty seconds before it happened." She paused. "Hit it. It's about to—"
I hit it.
Both hands. Everything I could scrape through this frustrating mortal battery of a body, aimed correctly this time, concentrated on exactly the right spot.
The lightning was honestly less impressive than I'd like.
It was enough.
The Drakon dissolved like smoke in wind. Ancient things don't leave bodies when they finally die. They leave absence. The shape in the air of something that used to be there. Then nothing.
The parking lot went quiet.
My hands were shaking.
I picked up my backpack.
"We should talk," Demi said.
"I need to leave." I brushed gravel off my sleeve. "This is going to keep happening and I can't keep having it happen here."
"Where are you going?"
I looked at her.
Brown eyes. Steady. Already three steps ahead in whatever conversation we were about to have — I could see it on her face. The thinking. The connecting of things.
That uncomfortable recognition moved through my chest again. The one I'd been ignoring since approximately the first day of school.
Not now, I told myself. Later. Or never. Preferably never. Focus.
"I have two brothers," I said, keeping it simple. "I need to find them. It's a long trip. It's going to be dangerous. More dangerous than—" I nodded at the Drakon-shaped absence. "You should go home, Demi."
She was quiet.
Then she reached down and picked up a bag I hadn't noticed by the gate.
Not her school bag.
Something bigger. Trip-sized.
Already packed.
I stared at it.
"You packed a bag," I said.
"I had another vision on the way to the bus." She said it like it was obvious. "You. A road. Somewhere I didn't know. I was there with you."
"That doesn't mean—"
"You need someone who can see what's coming." She looked at me. Just looked. Steady and certain and annoyingly, infuriatingly correct. "You know you do."
The frustrating thing about Demi — the thing that's been frustrating me since September — is that she is always right.
I don't know why she's always right.
I don't know why I trust it like it's my own instinct.
I was not going to examine that right now.
"Fine," I said. "But when I say move, you move. When I say stay, you stay."
"Within reason."
"That's not—"
"Within reason," she said again. Exact same tone. Done.
I looked at the sky.
Wrong up there. Still wrong. That pressure building at the western edge like weather that hadn't decided what it wanted to destroy yet.
My brothers were out there somewhere. The journey was going to be long and ugly and full of things trying to eat me.
At least I had a navigator who could see thirty seconds into the future.
Not exactly the divine army I used to have, I thought. But okay. Fine. We work with what we have.
I started walking.
Demi fell into step beside me.
"Your name isn't actually Jason," she said. Not a question. She was connecting dots out loud.
"No."
She nodded slowly. Processing.
"Mine isn't actually Demi either," she said quietly.
She wasn't really saying it to me. More like she was saying it to herself. Trying it out. Seeing how it felt.
I didn't answer.
But I noticed.
I notice everything. Always have.
It's a blessing when you're running a pantheon.
It's deeply inconvenient when you're trying very hard not to think about your lab partner.